Senate Report on Drugs
| DOI | 10.1177/000486587100400411 |
| Published date | 01 December 1971 |
| Date | 01 December 1971 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
252 AUST. &N.Z. JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (Dec., 1971): 4, 4
CURRENT COMMENT (4)
Senate Report on Drugs
Drug Trafficking and Drug Abuse, Report from the Senate Select Committee,
Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1971.
THIS is a very good report-,
It
is concise, quite well-written and, most
im-
portant,
an
enlightened document.
Our
Senate
Committee of
etght
worked with remarkable speed, as
it
Is
still less
than
two years since
the
committee was established. Of course,
they
did
not
do all
their
own homework. They
had
several reports from
England,
Canada
and
the
United
States
to give
them
guidance
and
to
obviate amassive research programme which would
have
needed asmall
army
of pharmacologists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, psychiatrists,
etc. The report- is enlightened,
although
the
young
may
not
think
so because
it
has
not
gone
the
whole hog of recommending
the
legalis.ation of
mari-
juana.
I wish
it
had
explained
its
reasons alittle more fully on this issue.
Yet
the
report
has
the
right
instincts
and
its opinions
and
recommenda-
tions
are
educated ones. One
cannot
help 'wondering how different
the
report would have been if made as recently as
1966.
Due to
the
time gap
propaganda of
the
Law-and-Order
and
Drugs-is-a-Commie-plot type
has
been avoided or dissipated by
1971.
(Pace Mrs. Askin).
This
report
is very good on
the
negatives.
There
is no evidence
that
marijuana
smokers build up a tolerance;
there
is no evidence
that
mari-
juana
smokers graduate to
harder
drugs;
there
is
not
sufficient evidence
of
marijuana's
harmlessness to recommend its legalization;
there
is no
evidence
that
a Mr. Big controls drug trafficking in .Australla:
there
are
no
or insufficient
drug
treatment
and
research facilities in Australia; ayoung
drug offender should
not
go to gaol or suffer
the
civil disability of a
criminal record;
there
is no sense in using
the
penal law to deal with
any
drug abuse
(although
this
does not, of course, include
traffickers).
The most
important
point which
the
committee
has
assimnated is
that
the
drug
situation is not purely aproduct
and
problem of
the
youth
culture
and
the
word "drugs" is
not
synonymous
with
pot
and
acid.
Just
after
the
interim
report of
the
Canadian
Committee on
the
Non-Medical
Use of Drugs was published
(and
which is now a best-seller in
are-issue
by Penguin Books),
there
was a cartoon by Reidford in
the
Toronto
Globe
and
Mail.
This cartoon epitomised
the
values of middle-
age, middle-class Canadian society. Two Toronto
matrons
are
pushing
their
shopping-carts down
the
aisle of a supermarket. One says to
the
other:
"You know, if it· weren't for my tranquillisers,
I'm
sure
I'd
be on drugs
myself". One
can
hear
Mrs.
Edna
Everedge saying
the
same thing. One
can
also see a cartoon of two Emile Mercier
characters
standing
in
a fly-
blown
bar
with
their
beer paunches spilling
out
of
their
singlets
and
shorts,
with fags
hanging
from
the
corners of
their
mouths, saying,
"It
beats me,
1. See appendix for the recommendations of the committee and
the
reservations of some
members.
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